EFL Championship Match 34 - Southampton 1 Millwall 2

 

In Your Own Time Baz

The visit of Millwall to St Mary‘s should be just what everyone ordered after our home defeat against Hull on Tuesday. Since we played them last, Millwall had appointed a new manager and plummeted towards the relegation places and if current form continues until the end of the season, they will be playing in League 1 next season, as amply illustrated by the two nil defeat at home to Sheffield Wednesday last week. The trigger was pulled on Joe Edwards and Neil Harris returned for his second spell as manager at the club where he was a goal scoring hero for so many years. In truth, from the outside, it seems a bit of a panic appointment with no real logic behind it, a bit like Sheffield United appointing Chris Wilder, simply because he’s been there before and not because he’s got any track record of being any good.

Anyway, Millwall will be hoping for new manager bounce and Saints will be hoping that Russell Martin gets it right today because we could be playing in front of a half empty ground with everyone in the pub if the names Smallbone, Rothwell and Stuart Armstrong are named as the midfield.
 
Itchen Bridge 2pm and the name I’m drawn to in our starting XI is Jack Stephens, which of course means that the shorhorn has been out.  Next thing is to look around the rest of the team to see who is missing and it turns out it’s Ryan Manning, so I assume that we’re going to go for something similar to what we had against West Brom a few days ago.  Mercifully, Joe Rothwell is not in the team and has been replaced with Joe Aribo. The substitutes that all came on and did well against Hull have all been selected so the front line is Wee man, Che Adams and David Brooks which means that Adam Armstrong has been dropped for the first time this season.  The Millwall starting lineup contains the name Michael Obafemi.  Party boy himself and his agent are still managing to find teams they think he’s going to apply himself. He still looks like a top-heavy middleweight boxer so I would anticipate him pulling a hamstring in about half an hour.

Away we go and what the fuck is this?  Kyle Walker-Peters is playing at left back and it looks like THB is playing right back with Captain Shoehorn in the middle.  So, it appears we have moved two of our best players from our regular back four into unfamiliar positions. Not only that, it appears that Captain Shoehorn is playing in unfamiliar position himself because he’s pushing up into midfield when we’ve got the ball. The first time we lose the ball it’s clear that no one really has a clue who is supposed to be at right back. Let’s just hope we’ve got this nailed down in the three days we’ve had to practice it since the whole game.

Anyway, it all starts well enough with Stuart Armstrong deciding to make up for the fact he was terrible in the last game by taking on three players down the left-hand side and beating everybody. He gets to the line and gets it across and Brooks volleys it down and it’s looping up towards the goal but the keeper Sarkic flaps it away.

The next involvement from Sarkic is a Big boot forward from the Millwall goalkeeper and Smallbone leans on Flemming, who collapses to the ground and the referee buys it, mainly because Smallbone has his hands on him.   He hasn’t pushed him but there you go.  Free kick about 40 yards out and Savile chips in and Baz hesitates and then goes and he’s late and Tanganga gets a head to it and it lobs into the net. He looks offside for a brief second but he isn’t because Stephens is a yard behind the rest of the defenders.  Fucks sake, what a start. Behind at home yet again.

We get the ball down and start knocking it about and Che Adams is absolutely trashed by Tanganga after he’s laid the ball off and the ball goes loose to Wee Man who is equally trashed by Leonard the right back.   That’s the second time Leonard has gone straight through Wee Man.  Referee Thomas Bramall should card them both at least but he only books Tanganga.  Stuart Armstrong‘s cross into the box is headed away and knocked back in by Smallbone and Adams gets up at the back post to loop a header over the goalkeeper but villain of the peace Tanganga is back on the goal line to head over the bar.

Wee Man is clearly in pain after the assault from Leonard and one of his crosses gets headed away and Millwall break into the area where we have no right back and the Millwall winger cuts in on his right foot and curls it about a yard wide of Baz and therefore the post. Fraser goes down after the ball goes wide and has to be replaced with Sam Edozie.

We are playing some decent stuff despite the slightly incongruous presence of Captain Shoehorn in midfield and we attack on the left and KWP picks it up and gets to the line but he won’t use his left foot to cross and instead turns out on his right foot and knocks it to Brooks. On to Stuart Armstrong who gets his head up and chips a lovely ball over the defenders for Che Adams to reach with his head and nod it through the goalkeeper to make it 1-1.  Now lets bury them.

Nice goal Che, Now Get Substituted

Instead of that though, Millwall put us under a bit of pressure with a cross from the left going over everybody and over to the other side back in it comes and Party Boy has his back to goal but turns and hits it and it hits Bednarek and bounces through to Baz. It’s one of those contacts on the ball where are you know that there has been a hand involved and the ref gives it and no real complaints. Flemming stepped up and scuffs it but it hits the inside of the post and goes in and he gives it the big one in front of the home end. Prick.

Half-time and this has been a struggle. I don’t really know what’s going on with the formation but it just seems mad to me that we’ve moved to have our best players and look rather disjointed. As the players re-emerge for the second half, there is no change for us but one thing never changes and that’s that if Michael Obafemi starts a game at St.Mary’s, then he gets substituted at half-time. See you later Party Boy you utter waste of space.

There’s not a lot going on in the opening 15 minutes of the second half. Tanganga flicks a Brooks cross over the bar before it gets to Adams and the referee of course gives a goal kick and the subs predictably get called fairly early but I can’t be too enthusiastic about Adam Armstrong and Joe Rothwell coming on, particularly as they are replacing Che Adams and Joe Aribo.  Why in particular are we taking Adams off?

The subs nearly make me eat my lack of enthusiasm as Stuart Armstrong gets away down the left, gets to the line and pulls it back. Adam Armstrong misses the ball as it rolls under his foot and Rothwell must score but no – straight at the fucking goalkeeper.

On 70 we get Suledjenepo coming for Brooks and Manning replaces Captain Shoehorn so we now have KWP playing as a conventional right back like he should’ve been all along and his cross into the middle is meant by Adam Armstrong who is not the requisite height and heads over the bar.  Che would have had a better chance of scoring that.

It’s all huff and puff and not a lot else and time goes by, mainly with Millwall wasting it.  90 minutes up and Suledjenepo puts over a cross and Adam Armstrong in the middle meets it again and he gets in the right direction this time down towards the corner but Sarkis gets across to make a decent save.

Well that was another absolute pile of shit from the moment the team was announced until the final whistle. An absolute clusterfuck from start to finish brought on entirely by Russell Martin overthinking everything. We’ve just gone 25 games undefeated and at that point he abandoned his like for like replacement when people got injured strategy, and we’ve been largely fucking shit. If Flynn Downes is injured, just play Shea Charles. It’s not fucking rocket science, it’s just common sense.  Stop trying to be too clever because as they have proved numerous occasions already this season, our players are not good enough for it.

Remember back to the 4-1 home defeat against Leicester when we had all this full-backs in midfield bollocks which didn’t work. Well here we are again only this time it’s Jack Stephens going from centre back into midfield like some shit Cornish Franz Beckenbauer and what that meant was that when we got caught on the break which we inevitably did, THB moved across to centre back and then there was fucking no one at right back unless Will Smallbone managed to get over there and if he did, there was no one in midfield.

The German Jack Stephens in his pomp

When Stephens stepped into midfield, he seem to be a magnet for the ball and the reason for that is that Millwall didn’t bother to mark him because why would they so e was always the free man. He played some decent propaganda passes and looked like there was an element of surprise with him turning up there when it came to actually do something creative like cross the ball, of course couldn’t do it because he’s a centre back and that’s not his game and that’s not his fault. The other problem was is that Joe Aribo, who was superb when he came on against Hull, hardly saw the ball because it now seemed too congested in midfield. So, if you wanna play Jack Stephens in midfield, then play him in midfield and then at least we’ve only got one player out of position instead of trying to come up with some clever bollocks that leaves us with three players out of position and others impacted adversely by the decision. If you definitely want to play Jack Stephens then leave one of the centre backs out and again, don’t disrupt the entire fucking team.

Oh and also, once again, stop playing Smallbone as the defensive midfielder if you’re not going to get the right structure around him.. It doesn’t fucking work, it hasn’t worked at all this season so don’t fucking do it anymore. He is not a bad player but he is absolutely shit at the number six role unless you sacrifice to other players to keep close to him to cover up his deficiencies. There is no shame in not being able to play the number six position and most would all love to live in the world where every player could play every position but we are not there. Some of our players can’t even play one position properly.

It just seemed like all totally unnecessarily over complicated bollocks. Millwall would be in the bottom three if they had lost today but we changed our own whole game plan from what has been really successful this season on a whim and we made them look good. Two attacks, a free kick in a penalty, two goals. Dogshit. I understand is changing the game plan for West Brom because that was a specific task away from home against a good team. This was fucking Millwall at home, where up until this week we had won about ten games in a row or something but both in this game and against Hull, Russell shit the bed. I’m wondering if any of the support staff are brave enough to say that they don’t think something is a particularly good idea.

In the second half, we huffed and puffed, still with the shite bat shit mental formation without ever really looking like we were going to score and then we finally went to a proper formation with about 70 minutes gone by which time the pattern was set for this particular game. Shea Charles still didn’t make it onto the pitch and instead what we did and it took until 70 minutes to actually bring on full back in Ryan Manning and take off Jack Stephens, who had been playing for 10 minutes as a conventional left back,  After his horror show against Hull, we brought on Joe Rothwell to bring his particular brand of “what the fuck is this guy doing“ to the proceedings. Adam Armstrong has been shit for the last few weeks and needed a rest but we brought him on and took off Che Adams who had already scored today and was probably playing with a bit of confidence. All of it absurd, all of it self-inflicted and all of it completely unnecessary.

Millwall‘s game plan was obvious and it was get stuck in leave a bit on every player you tackle and play on the break. And Ryan Fraser got booted out of the game today and had to be substituted in the first half in the same way that Edozie got booted out of the game against Norwich. There wasn;t even a yellow card for todays assault by Leonard on Fraser. This is the same old pre-VAR discussion about players needing to be protected. Heavy tackles have always going on since the game was invented but both against Norwich and today, the offender should’ve been sent off. The referee largely let them get away with the rough stuff and Saints played completely into their hands by not having a proper set up for when we lost the ball.. Once the free kick it been awarded for the first goal however, it is totally down to Gavin Bazunu not making his mind up quickly enough to come for the ball and then not electing to punch it. If you come for the ball as a goalkeeper and get beaten to it by an opposition attacker in the air, then you have fucked up. The second goal was handball and there’s no getting away from that.

So, absolute shit and Russell Martin’s desire to be Mr Clever Bollocks is in danger of undoing a hell of a lot of good work that is going on recently. With this style of football, you cannot win games if you don’t have a defensive midfield strategy with suitable players.

Russell was absolutely raging at the referee and what he allowed Millwall to get away with at the end and also kind of defended the tactics and blamed the bad goals for the reason that we lost.  Yes the goals conceded were crap but interestingly he also called the second half flat and I wonder why the second half is flat? Maybe Russell is feeling the pressure a little bit from having so many games this month. He has said in the past that the three-game weeks leave him drained and we’ve had about three of those back to back.

Next up, no worries, it gets easier, Liverpool away in the FA Cup and if we don’t have a defensive midfield strategy for when we lose the ball in that game, they are going to go in dry and we are going to be leaving Anfield like we’ve been sat on a horse for two days.